Alcatel One Touch Fire Review

Introduction

It's been a while since chatter of a Firefox OS was nothing more than a faint whisper, so we'll be checking up with the Mozilla-developed platform's progress as it performs on the Alcatel One Touch Fire with a level of excitement. Originally known as Boot to Gecko (B2G), Firefox OS has definitely been going on for a while now, though an essential question remains: is the OS worth investing into?

In the box:

• Wall charger
• USB Cable
• Earphones with a microphone
• User manual

Design

As most other low-cost smartphones out there, the Alcatel One Touch Fire is just a slab of glossy plastic. We see nothing impressive or innovative about its design, but we can't call it bad either. The handset itself, despite being a bit chubby, is light, comfortable to hold, and small enough to fit in most pockets. It can be used easily with a single hand thanks to its petite proportions. The overall feel you get when interacting in any way with the One Touch Fire, however, is decidedly low end – the plastic feels even cheaper than usual.

Underneath the phone's touchscreen we have a single capacitive button that takes the user back to the home screen when tapped. The power and volume buttons, located on the top-left and left sides of the handset respectively, are well exposed and have a nice travel to them.

Display

The 3.5-inch TFT screen on the Alcatel One Touch Fire is barely passable, though this is somewhat justified by the phone's budget price point. While we're far from simply dismissing a display simply because of its compact proportions, there's a point to be made about the annoying persistence of 320x480 pixel panels. Viewing angles are average at best and outdoor visibility is problematic. As is the case with many budget phones, the display is one of the largest sacrifices you'll have to make when buying into a device like the One Touch Fire.

Interface and functionality

While Firefox OS is a totally new operating system, its user interface does seem quite familiar. We see that the OS has borrowed a number of features found on other mobile operating systems, such as the slide-down notification panel with quick toggles à la Android, and the iOS-like arrangement of applications on the home screens. To tell you the truth, we grew comfortable with Firefox OS rather quickly as there wasn't anything drastically different about it. The platform's only peculiarity is that one of the home screens is dedicated to discovering new apps. It has a quick search bar and a list of app categories, aiding the user with finding applications they might find useful.

Unfortunately, we don't see Firefox OS as a platform that has been thoroughly polished prior to its release, and it appears especially problematic on weak hardware like the one in the Alcatel One Touch Fire. In fact, we encountered a number of bugs that often required us to reboot the phone in order to restore its working state. Sometimes the phone would just reboot on its own after us trying to launch an app, or just hang for a long time.

The problems with Firefox OS don't end here, however, and it's really the smaller things that really ruined the experience for us. For example, UI elements can be tiny at times, even though there's enough real estate for a more spacious design. Moreover, the existence of a dedicated homescreen page reserved solely to display the date and time appears redundant, especially since you have a system-wide status bar with the clock. Speaking of redundancies, unlike other OSes, Firefox has a two-click unlock, which again, while not a big deal, serves to annoy the user.

Now that we've gotten a bit more specific, it's probably also worth noting that core apps like the dialer, messaging, contacts and e-mail are all pretty standard and are an adequate implementation of basic, but essential functionality. In case you travel often, you should probably keep in mind that Firefox OS uses HERE Maps, a great alternative to Google Maps, though the One Touch Fire simply takes too long to render map data, not to mention that the GPS had difficulty locating us, and would often times simply refuse to work

Before we wrap this up, it's also important to note that while you can technically side-load some Android apps, in the case of the Alcatel One Touch Fire that would equal an exercise in futility – the device unfortunately has trouble running even some of the built-in apps, so a big chunk of the already extremely limited selection of apps on the Firefox Marketplace will prove too heavy for this device

Processor and memory

We've been pretty tough on the hardware on the Alcatel One Touch Fire, and here's why: it's got a single-core 1GHz Snapdragon S1 chip by Qualcomm and a measly 256MB of RAM. Now, considering the very budget friendly price point on the phone, we might have given the One Touch Fire a pass regardless of the underwhelming specs. Unfortunately, however, using this phone is an absolutely frustrating experience, since it lags constantly even when executing the most basic of tasks. Gaming is simply out of the question, unless you're looking for some Solitaire or Sudoku action – that, it can handle.

In terms of storage, you've got 512MB to play with, though only 160MB of those are available for app installs. Thankfully, Alcatel has included a free 2GB microSD card in the box where you can store media content such as photos, music and videos (but no apps).

Internet and connectivity

Since Firefox OS is made by the same company that brought us the wonderful Firefox web browser, one might assume that the Alcatel One Touch Fire handles web pages well. Sadly, that isn't quite the case. The Firefox browser pre-installed on this handset loads pages pretty slow – PhoneArena.com takes over a minute to fully render, not to mention that it crashes every now and then after loading for a while. Seeing as the browser works great on other platforms, we're more inclined to believe that, once again, it's the weak hardware that's at fault here.

Camera

The only camera you get with the Alcatel One Touch Fire is the one on its back – a basic, 3.2MP snapper with fixed focus and no flash. It takes mediocre photos with little detail and washed-out colors, as one might expect.

The camcorder is far worse, however. It shoots video in the largely obsolete .3GPP format at an odd 352x288 resolution and the resulting files are really choppy (14 FPS) when viewed on a larger screen.

Multimedia

When it comes to multimedia, the Alcatel One Touch Fire truly brings memories of the feature phone era. The stock music and video players are as simplistic as possible, and not in a good way. Music controls, for example, should be a ubiquitous function by now, but not in the case of Firefox OS – the only way to navigate through your play list is to never leave the Music app.

What's more, support for both music and video playback is extremely limited – the device randomly doesn't recognize some songs even from the same format, and we only managed to get it to read an MPEG-4 encoded video in our tests. When we actually managed to get the device to play a video or two, it was no better, either – the speaker is loud (so loud it rattles the entire handset) and sound quality is poor.

Worst of all, there's no alternative to the built-in players on the Marketplace which is just a shame.

Call Quality

With the so far disastrous showing from the Alcatel One Touch Fire, we were half-expecting another crisis with call quality. Luckily, this time around we were proven wrong – call quality is definitely above average for its class, the speaker is loud and clear and people were able to hear us fine even with significant noise in the background.

Battery Life

The 1400mAh cell on the Alcatel One Touch Fire, coupled with the low-resolution screen and crippled chipset means that the phone's battery life is actually one of its strongest points. It can easily get through a day of usage, even two if you're conservative.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we've got to say that the Alcatel One Touch left us truly polarized, confused and, frankly, frustrated on a number of things.

On one hand, we acknowledge the fact that this is a budget device through and through, and lousy hardware is to be expected. On the other hand, however, we can't pretend to be oblivious to the fact that this device probably shouldn't have made the internal cut to start with.

Then, there's Firefox OS. We're plenty excited about the prospect of more diversity, we really are. Unfortunately, even when accounting for the part that the low-end hardware played, we've got to say that the OS has a long, long way to go. This means that while the underlying functionality is mostly stable and working, Mozilla is many miles away from offering the user experience that its rivals do. What's even more, while we understand that Mozilla needs to start somewhere, we've got to question whether it was the wisest decision to go with such a decidedly low-end device that simply magnifies the OS' weaknesses and only serves to push the odd early adopter away.